Fitness Testing: Fun Or Futile?

By: Alayna

As the end of the school year is approaching, everyone is preparing for end-of-the-year fitness testing in gym class. Students are expected to surpass all of their scores from the fall and winter tests, but how many actually feel that they are prepared to accomplish this?

“They know I run, they watch me run, why do they have to make me run? If the pacer test was a person, I would push it off a cliff. I don’t care and I feel very judged when I’m doing push-ups,” Chloe Kremer stated. Another student, Juha Kim, added on to this, “I also hate the people that get over 100 on the pacer. Like, nobody wants to watch you run, I hope you fall and everyone laughs at you”. Amelia Morgart stated, “I feel that the testing serves no purpose. The teachers shouldn’t be concerned about how much we can run because that is fat shaming”. Student, Hannah Highberger, believes that fitness testing is also unfair, even to those who perform in school athletics, “I think it is a good way to see how far students have progressed, but I don’t think that it is fair to grade students based on how well they do. Take the heart rate monitors for example, the athletes that do more outside of gym have to try a lot harder to get their monitor to work than the people that are less active,” she declared, “It truly doesn’t measure people currently. We are in a society that doesn’t consider injuries and medical conditions”. Students Qasim Hussain and Avalon Anderson shared a similar point of view on this topic, “I mean it’s fine, but we do it like every five weeks, so it’s not fine,” Hussain stated. Anderson said, “I think we just did fitness testing. Why would we do it again at the end of the year to see our improvement? I don’t want to see my improvement personally”. Lastly, student Abby Gibbs said, “I am personally not a fan of cardio. I think that we as a democracy should get rid of running”.

In conclusion, there are obviously many opinions about the upcoming fitness testing, but should the teachers be worried that none of the students seem very confident or excited to see their progress from the beginning of the year?